| The political will for common property |
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| Written by Ianko Stoianov |
| Saturday, 27 September 2008 23:35 |
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The political will for common property
We shall start with Plato. Plato made the idea of communism great and superb and to a highest degree pure and noble, and owing to that, he has led many people: the Plato-like thinking Jews, Thomas More, Tomaso Campanella, Morelly, Babeuf, Fourier, Marx, Engels, Lenin; he was their great teacher. All his followers felt the greatness of his ideas. And great they were and, unfortunately, still abstract as well. However, it was absolutely naturally that neither Plato nor his followers knew or could know anything whatsoever about the insufficient greatness of his yet abstract ideas. These glorious geniuses were the pioneers of communism; they set its beginning. Everything was in the beginning and the doctrine of communism was still to be developed. And this development and only it and nothing else but it is the main goal of the Neo-Communist Manifesto. Let us, however, for the time being go into Plato's determinations and examine them in more details: the myth of the perfect good, of the perfect social system, of the superiority and perfection of egalitarianism, the myth of abundance. According to Plato: ?That city then is best ordered [governed] in which the greatest number? of citizens ?use the expression ?mine? and ?not mine? of the same things in the same way.?1 ? ?Then, these citizens, above all others, will have one and the same thing in common which they will name mine, and by virtue of this communion they will have their pleasures and pains in common.?2 ??Then will law-suits and accusations against one another vanish, one may say, from among them, because they have nothing in private possession but their bodies, but all else in common??3 Two thousand and four hundred years later Marx echoed Plato?s ideas, developing them in a remarkable way. He wrote that the communists could summarize their theory in one expression: abolishment of private property. According to Marx-Plato's communism, the common cause that is at the root of every public evil is the domination of private property; in order a just social order to be settled it is necessary to completely reject the very institution of private property and to destroy all proprietary relations in society, so that all its members are in identical relations with the means of production as well as with the objects of consumption. On the basis of this, the means of production in a just society cannot belong personally to anybody and cannot be anybody's exclusive property, and each individual is primarily a social human being. The society becomes an enormous and united to the highest degree commune, in which everybody does what he can ? in accordance with his abilities ? for the social wealth and takes from it what he needs. Legislation and law are oriented towards the fact that in society all members are equal, i.e. nobody possesses anything personally; in this society and in the state arranged on this basis there is no place for private persons, for free private business efforts and initiatives. The really great, the elevated in this idea, with which the latter has been attracting the minds and the wills of countless followers for more than 2400 years, is that it is filled up with the most noble aspirations and excellent intentions. In this idea one can see the highest purposes, which humanity can put itself: to secure prosperity for all and in an equal measure for all; the purpose of society is universal public happiness, i.e. equal happiness for all individuals, who are born equal in rights and needs, i.e. everybody has an equal right to use all goods; in this theoretically first and yet undeveloped form of a communist society there must be neither extreme wealth nor extreme poverty; the citizens must be educated in the spirit of solidarity and equality, of friendship, good will and mutual aid, of justice, consent and harmony; all members of such a society have common interest in a social system without private property; an arrangement of society on the basis of Marx's famous development of the Platonian principle of this yet primitive communism: ?From everyone according to the abilities, to everyone according to the needs.? For three thousands years now these purposes have deservedly attracted the poor, who have invariably been in a great majority in each epoch till now. They have always demanded justice, prosperity and public happiness for all ? even if they have not been conscious of these principles and have not clearly formulated their will in full conformity with these principles. These purposes are eternal ? great and indestructible ? and each following epoch will contain them with absolute necessity, will have them and inevitably must have them as a purpose, because they are moments of the purposes of the Absolute Rational Will, but at the same time, the really higher task of the newest politovolia is to develop them and achieve them in their truth and right; and there is no doubt whatsoever that the neo-communist movement is bound to develop them and, in so doing, to attain a higher standpoint on communism. These purposes are only moments of the Absolute Will, which at this first stage of its development cannot yet realized itself completely through them. It has only marked its beginning, and that realization is a purpose of its whole further development. Marx-Plato's doctrine is nothing more but the very first ? still primitive ? stage of the will for communism because from the two opposite determinations ? common property and private property ? it proclaims that the first is completely desirable, whereas the second is undesirable. Here the Will still does not attain to the concept of universality and the concept of singularity, of individuality, in their truth and takes all opposite determinations of the Absolute Rational Will in their one-sidedness and division because ? unfortunately! ? it is unable to interweave them and, thus, to have them in their totality, truth and right. This yet undeveloped form of communism is only in the beginning of its development and is completely deprived of personalism, i.e. of the principle of personality, the principle of subjectivity and, therefore,does not acknowledge the absolute ends of Man, the ends of the absolute rational will. In it Man has to act not for his own purposes and interests, which are close to his heart and fill up his soul, his aspirations, desires, longings, Will, but he has to subdue, to obey to society, strictly speaking, to obey to the rulers of this society (Plato calls them guardians); a society that can exist in this kind only thanks to a strictest, a most severe oppressing man's freedom regulation by the rulers. The great moment of this initial form of the principle is that the individual is required to have only universal consciousness in a unity with the laws, with the universal end of the state, so that each separate subject has the spirit and the will of the political community as his absolute end, as his second spiritual-willed nature; he is supposed to want, act, live and enjoy only insofar as he is the living actualisation of the Rational Will of his political community. This moment is absolutely necessary. Yet, Marx-Plato?s doctrine lacks a large number of other essential volitions of human nature: the personal passions and interests of man are forgotten, they still are not taken into consideration in it. In real life they are important in the extreme; they are the determinate way in which the absolute volition manifests itself. Hegel expresses this idea in his own way: ?Impulse and passion constitute nothing other than the liveliness of the subject however, in accordance with which it is itself involved in its purpose and in the carrying out of the same. What is ethical concerns the content, which as such is the universal, an inactive factor deriving its motivation from the subject. This motivation constitutes interest in that it is immanent within the content, and passion in that it involves the whole of active subjectivity.?4 In passion the absolute purposes are revealed; purposes that activate man for only his own purposes are the source of energy of his will to act for himself, for his own interests, to cognise, to have and insatiably, unabatedly to enjoy the infinite sphere of his subjective, personal freedom ? the true and the great in man. Unfortunately, Marx-Plato's form of communism does not acknowledge this absolute, unconditional, infinite motivation of the subject at all; and what is more, Marx-Plato?s form fully eliminates the principle of subjective freedom, which is the principle of vitality, of mobility and pays a high price for that, remaining only a lifeless, non-effective, empty and hollow as well as perfectly abstract form, like for example a blooming cut-off tree, planted in dry sand: a dead tree. Here is not given a full range for contribution and manifestation of the infinite energy of the Will for development, Freedom; individuality is wanted to have only common purposes, to act in the name of the society, for the society and only in this round-about way for itself. True, individuality must be realised entirely as a socialised individual and, therefore, as a fully authorised member of the political community; yet, in Marx-Plato?s doctrine the individual is only in possibility, in itself, but not in actuality an in-and-for-itself having itself universal individuality. In point of fact, in no way can the 20th-century realisation of Marx-Plato's teaching, the Stalinist regime, be called communism for it was totally deprived of true humanism. The highest dependence of the individual on the society in Marx-Plato's doctrine is apparent; the subject is not acknowledged as a personality yet. Being abstract, this allegedly most just communism, inevitably comes into its highest opposite; it is the most unjust towards man. All the limitations and prohibitions imposed by it aim at destroying the most human in man: the aspiration towards the individual, the personal, the absolutely unabated desire to compete with his likes. These philosophers' thinking Will is still abstract and one-sided; they want to deprive man of freedom of action, of his supreme right of free competition, although it is just a sine qua non for the full and undisturbed development of the human person and, furthermore, a condition for the development of society, of mankind in general, of the ?I? as such. However, the universal purposes and laws in the life of the society ? which I am required to be in unity with, ? must be brought to the trial of my thinking and willing itself Rational Will. I (everyone is ?I?, a person) want to examine whether I find in them myself, my subjectivity and individuality, my Will and my thought; it is absolutely necessary: to be acknowledged the absolute right of the ?I? to have freedom, to have it at his disposal. I want to examine whether this universal thought and Will is my thought and Will and whether I am at home with myself in them, in other words, whether I am free. Hegel?s speculative comment upon Plato?s idea of property deserves to be quoted here in full: ?Personal property is a possession which belongs to me as a certain person, and in which my person as such comes into existence, into reality: on this ground Plato excludes it. It remains, however, unexplained how in the development of industries, if there is no hope of acquiring private property, there can be any incentive to activity; for on my being a person of energy very much depends my capacity for holding property. That an end would be put to all strife and dissensions and hatred and avarice by the abolition of private property, as Plato thinks, may very well be imagined in a general way; but that is only a subordinate result in comparison with the higher and reasonable principle of the right of property: any liberty has actual existence only in so far as property falls to the share of the person. In this way we see subjective freedom consciously removed by Plato himself from his state.?5 This is the level up to which Plato and later Marx raised the theoretical politovolia of communism. As a matter of fact, it contains all positive moments of humanistic communism; yet, in the general and in the whole, it remains abstract. Man is required to humble, to submit himself entirely to society, which in itself is an abstract subject, if it gives no field for manifestation of the absolute, the infinite, the true subject, the person. Here, within the framework of Plato-Marx doctrine the Will is still in the very beginning of its development of humanistic communism and, for this reason, it has not yet risen above its consciousness for the common. The negation of private property is also a negation of personality, a negation of the infinitely important moment of the principle of subjective freedom. Thus, definitions and relations that in fact belong to the individual are made social property. Here the individuals, the subjects cannot develop freely through and for themselves; they are only common people and only in possibility, in themselves, they are free as consciousness and Will, but not in actuality, for themselves. The common property, the common, claimed to be mine, is not my own activity. My poor activity is not yet the highest degree of absolute activity, which in general is an activity only as an activity of the individual for it is the individuality that has the will to put everything in action and makes the world go round. The absolute energy of Will is the immanent substance of each person; his property is unthinkable without the activity of his spiritual Will. The latter has itself only as far as it acts freely, but in Plato-Marx's form of communism, the supreme right of Man to be in full possession of his Rational Will is rejected and forbidden: the right to possess, master and use its total property, its freedom. Here the right of the individuality, of the individual to be the owner of his spirit and Will is not acknowledged. The principle of abstract common property is at the same time a principle of rejection of personal freedom. It rejects completely freedom and creates people with slavish psyche, i.e. it is a principle of blind, slavish, passive, oppressing the subjective freedom obedience, on the basis of which only political enslavement and dictatorship are possible. Detailed and pedantic regulation of absolutely everything by the rulers paralyses the initiative, kills the creativity and the independence of the individuals. Here the infinitely rich content of the subject?s property is not for him, he has only what is given to him; he is a passive will. (However, as we will see later Man's will is also passive in all kinds of capitalist societies, which are based on the political enslavement of their citizens and dictatorship of the Big Bourgeoisie.) Thus, in all his deeds ? social as well as personal ? man loses entirely his individual Will, his independence, he is not a subject of political life, but only an object of governing; he is in a pure passive state of being governed. Here we have the most abstract universality, which does not contain in itself the principle of personality, excludes it and, because of that, remains without truth and right; the most untrue and rightless organization of the community of individuals in a state. The politovolers of this sort did not know yet what is genuinely right; they did not come to it, and even in modern times Marx, Engels, and Lenin failed to understand it. Hegel has every right to state that ?The general principle that underlies Plato's ideal state violates the right of personality by forbidding the holding of private property. The idea of a pious or friendly and even a compulsory brotherhood of men holding their goods in common and rejecting the principle of private property may readily present itself to the disposition which mistakes the true nature of the freedom of mind and right and fails to apprehend it in its determinate moments. In property my will is the will of a person; but a person is a unit and so property becomes the personality of this arbitrary will. Since property is the means whereby I give my will an embodiment, property must also have the character of being ?his? or ?mine.? This is the important doctrine of the necessity of private property.?6 According to Marx-Plato's yet abstract communism equality has priority over freedom, but Marx should have examined the genuinely speculative ideas of Aristotle and especially Hegel on the notion of equality; they are the philosophers who are worth examining more than anybody else. Hegel?s remarks deserve to be quoted in full: ?The equality which may be set up, e. g. in connection with the distribution of the goods, would all the same soon be destroyed again, because wealth depends on diligence. But if a project cannot be executed, it ought not to be executed. Of course men are equal, but only qua persons, that is, with respect only to the source from which possession springs; the inference from this is that everyone must have property.?7 Aristotle expresses the same idea in his Politics; it is a truth as old as the world. But in order to cognise the truth a speculative mind is needed, and this is exactly what all thinkers who have been developing the very first stage of the politovolia of communism still lacked. Universality as it is defined in Marx-Plato's doctrine is not yet the truly universal, in and for itself having itself Will because it still does not contain in itself the principle of personality ? of individuality, of individualization and subjectivity. Yet, it is precisely the latter that is the true concrete universality, because the truly legal equality, the identity of persons in society is based on the freedom of Rational Will, on the equal independence and the equal dignity of the individuals. It is namely the subjective individuality that has the absolute purpose in itself, posits that purpose to itself and ? as the completely concrete and as a totality of the Absolute Rational Will, ? is the free, self-determining realization of all absolute purposes. The universal and the individual constitute the strongest infinite opposition of the absolute volition, which as an absolute form with its inherent infinite flexibility interweaves these two moments in their organic unity, in which each moment is as necessary as the other one, and passes over into its opposite so that each of them in its opposite is at home with itself. Unfortunately, the abstract, unreasonable Will ? and still such is the Will in Marx-Plato's conception ? invariably divides the opposites from one another and examines the one without its other. This communism is the concrete beginning of universality, which has not yet reconciled with the principle of subjectivity and, as a result, remains without truth and freedom; the right of subjective freedom, of personality is not acknowledged in it. It is not the concrete fully developed humanistic communism yet. That is why in the universal, in the legislation of this type of state, organised on the basis of negation of the principle of individuality, subjective individuality is not at home with itself, but out of itself; it is utterly impossible an actual political freedom to be developed in such a Stalinist type of states because the Will of the subject is not yet through and through wholly and completely his own genuinely free Will. The subject's own will obtains only the abstract form of universality, because everything individual, peculiar, personal is chased out of it. Thus, in and through society the subject does not yet unite freely with the very itself; Plato and Marx throw away the principle of energy, vitality and development from their state. The greatest disadvantage of Marx-Plato's idea is that it is only the beginning of the concrete idea of communism, which still lacks the principle of individuality, subjectivity, personality; this principle must be made legitimate, ethical in the state, since the latter is a rational organization, which includes in itself all the moments of the Absolute Rational Will. Communism, the universal, is an absolutely necessary moment of the Absolute Rational Will, but taken in its abstract Marx-Plato's form, it does not yet contain the principle of concrete personality, the principle of concrete individuality and, consequently, cannot lead to anything else but an utterly abstract and lifeless organisation of political reality. At this point it is under absolute necessity to accept in itself the principle of infinite free subjectivity, of subjective freedom, and reconcile with it, in order to come to its truth and right, and in so doing, to advance to its rational will, in which truly legal communism is personalism as well. Rational Will has to advance to the complete development of the deepest contradiction of its opposite moments ? universality and individuality, to sublate them, to reconcile them and, in so doing, to solve the contradiction and achieve them in their absolute unity. This must be done. That is the reason why in practical politovolia as well as in theoretical politovolia the subject leaves this stifling world of dark abstractions, ? the world of abstract communism, ? about which its founding fathers maintain with the unhesitating infinite optimism of Voltaire's Candid that in their best of the worlds everything goes and will go towards the good. Thus, the subject emerges into the light. As a moment of the absolute in universality the form of subjectivity is only in itself, only in possibility. Now due to its own ends and its absolute urge to realise them and come to possession of itself within itself, it sets itself against the universal. Plato and Marx ? these great world-historic figures and teachers of humanity ? were not fated to do that; they failed to solve the contradiction. They wanted to escape it, to destroy it and, consequently, they were not capable to advance beyond the sphere of imperfect and one-sided presentation of the teaching of true communism. Yet, there are countless great Plato and Marx's theses worth developing now and in the future. For a Neo-Communist Manifesto it is absolutely essential to point out honestly all positive moments of Marx-Plato's teaching and, especially, its humanism. It will be done in an uncompromising way in the Marxism and Stalinism chapter of the Manifesto; and it cannot be the other way round for it is going to be a manifesto, which aims at being a presentation of the universal will for concrete and fully developed humanistic communism. There is no doubt whatsoever that the necessity of the universal, of communism, is absolute, as absolute as the necessity of the singular, the subjective, the individual is; both are immanent and necessary moments of the Absolute Rational Will. All ethical institutions created by Man has to contain them in their truth and right. The Absolute Rational Will marches inflexibly towards true law and freedom. Marx-Plato's doctrine examined only the universal, only the principle of universality; it is insufficient. The Rational Will wills to come into possession of its highest good, i.e. it wills itself alone. It marches towards true right and freedom in which the principle of individuality is as developed and realized as the principle of universality. As we shall see, now the absolute infinite subjectivity is to develop itself and put itself as only finite private property (Chapters II.B.a) whereas the universal attains the standpoint of public subjective rights (Chapter II.C.a). What is to be treated thoroughly in these chapters now is these two moments and their determinations.
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